by Nino Ricci
I asked what had happened to the Zealot.
“He went off,” was all he said, and I imagined him drinking himself half to death, or worse.
It turned out most of our group had fled at the news of Jesus’s arrest, even among Jesus’s inner circle, and those who had stayed Simon had sent home. It was just the two of us left and the women, somewhere in the crowd.
The rain hadn’t let up. On the hill, four soldiers had set to work on the crosses with Roman efficiency, chiselling niches into the beams to lock them together and binding them with rope and nails. Then they laid them out in a row, each to its hole, to ready them for their load.
They brought the prisoners over one by one, since it was just the same four soldiers who were doing the work, two to hold the men in place and two with hammers. One of the Galileans went first, and he just took up his position on the wood on his own, with a quietness that chilled you. The soldiers took his measure, so a peg could be fastened to the upright to rest his weight on, and then his arms were stretched out along the crossbeam with a soldier holding each and the spikes were nailed in at the wrists. The first blow was the one that got a scream but it was also the easiest, since it was only flesh to pass through. Then there were just the grunts of swallowed pain and the thump of the nails sinking into the wood.
The soldiers worked their way along the line like that, thundering away with their hammers as if building some infernal machine. They showed the same efficiency they had in putting the crosses together, attaching the peg and then hammering the wrists down, in unison, and then doing the feet, one over the other, with hardly a breath in between to break their rhythm. But the more they went along the more steeped they were in blood, despite the rain and a rag they carried to wipe themselves, so that it was like a dream to watch them, where suddenly some normal, innocent thing turned into a horror. And all this, too, like the flogging, was a kindness to the men, since it helped them to die, instead of leaving them to hang alive for days while their limbs turned green and their eyes were plucked by the birds. It seemed the Romans had devised the perfect way to kill a man, with such a mix of cruelty and kindness you couldn’t fault them either way.
After the first Galilean it was his companion who was up, then Jesus and Jerubal. Jesus wasn’t any different than the rest, crying out with the pain—he was made of flesh like them, which was what such treatment reduced you to, just skin and blood and bone and the ache of them. It was strange to see him that way, as if all of his notions, all of his sayings and his stories, counted for nothing now, and it was only his animal nature that mattered.
Because of his leg Jerubal had to be laid out by the soldiers, who took him by the arms and leaned him back to the ground. I had to look away then, though I couldn’t miss the howl of pain when they did his legs. That was the sound that stayed with me during the rest, like a wind blowing through.
It was only when the four had finished the last man that they started setting the crosses upright, two of them lifting at the crossbeam and the other two guiding the base and then heaping dirt around to secure it. The crosses went into their holes with a thump, so you were afraid the men would tear free. But there was just their cough of pain at the jolt and then they hung in eerie suspension, their feet only a few spans above the ground so it seemed that with the smallest effort they might step down from there, and walk away.
Then they were lined up on their crosses in the rain, with the grey wall of the city behind them and, above that, the black sky. Jerubal’s face was already set in what looked like the rictus of death from the pain, so that there seemed hardly a trace left in him of the grinning man I’d met in Gergesa. I wanted to think now it wasn’t so fanciful that he’d done the thing on purpose, to save some of the rest of us—it didn’t make much sense, otherwise. Maybe he’d been Jesus’s miracle, won over by him in the end like a character from one of Jesus’s stories. But it was just as likely he’d made a mistake, and had never reckoned he’d be killed.
Simon and I stood there a long while after that, staring up at the hill. Eventually the crowd started to thin and I made out not far from us, hardly a hundred paces away, Jesus’s brothers, and the women. I hadn’t picked them out since before we’d passed through the city gate. Even now, the rain had reduced them to the same mud and grey as the rest of the crowd, so that it took a moment to notice the different air that came off them. They had shuffled into two groups as if someone had sorted them, the three brothers in one, the eldest like a bulwark in the middle of them, the three women in the other. I noticed now that the mother had an arm around Mary, the two joined under the mother’s cloak as if they’d been brought to the same level, helpless like children who’d been left behind. It didn’t seem to matter any more how differently they’d seen Jesus—it had come to the same thing, in the end, that neither had got what they’d wanted from him, and now they’d lost him.
A silence seemed to hang over the group of them, as conspicuous as if it was itself a sound. I thought of the funerals I’d seen in Baal-Sarga, with the keeners who were paid to mourn, and their wailing seemed a quiet thing next to this, just the drone of the rain and then nothing.
There wasn’t much to see on the crosses after the first agony had passed and the men had settled into the bearable misery of it. Still, you couldn’t take your eyes away, looking for the twitch of a limb or a heave of breath, any smallest sign of life. Jesus’s mother was the same, and Mary beside her—you thought they’d turn away, that the pain of watching would be too great, but they stood there with their eyes fixed on Jesus as if to take in every bitter drop of his dying.
“I ought to have stood by him,” Simon said. It was a long time since he’d spoken. “It was what he taught us.”
I thought to say, Then you’d be there alongside him. But it seemed that was his point, that he’d rather be up there on the hill than watching from below.
Jerubal, on account of his leg, was the first to die. I could sense the moment it happened, though it was a while that he’d been hanging limp—one instant it was Jerubal on the cross, clinging to his last breath, and then just dead flesh. Jesus died not long afterwards. The rest hung on though it looked to be getting towards nightfall, when they’d have to be taken down, to respect Jewish law. The soldiers went around with a club then to smash their legs, so they’d slump and suffocate. It didn’t take long after that. Even before the last one had gone, the soldiers had started lowering the crosses to cart away the dead, prying their limbs from the wood with an iron wedge and then carrying them over to the graveyard nearby and heaping them all together into one of the tombs.
Mary came over to us then, her face so emptied it cut to your bone.
“We’re undone,” she said, and just fell to her knees in the mud. Simon tried to gather her up and ended by awkwardly embracing her, hulking and large against her tiny frame.
“We always came to understand the hardest things with him,” he said. “Maybe even this we’ll come to understand.”
They stood like that, Mary clinging to him, until Simon grew uneasy and said there was nothing to be done, and they should leave for home.
He looked to me to ask if I’d join them but his eyes said the opposite, wary of all I knew.
“I’ll manage on my own,” was all I said, and the truth was I only wanted to be alone then, and on my way.
They left me there and walked over to Jesus’s family, and then the group of them set off together without looking back, Simon and the older brother big-shouldered and tall in the middle of them but seeming reduced now, like mountains worn away.
The rain had stopped by then and the crowd had mostly gone, thinned down just to straggling groups of passersby coming and going from the pilgrim camp. I ought to have gone myself, but instead I just stood there watching the soldiers as they took the last of the men away. They propped the crosses haphazardly back into their holes to stand a little ominous and askew there at the top of the hill, to be left to rot, I supposed, or scavenged by someone
low enough to make use of them. Finally darkness came on but I kept by my place, at the back of my head thinking that when the soldiers left I might get into the tomb where they’d put the dead and maybe clean Jerubal a bit and lay him out properly for the other side, since it seemed to fall to me to be the one to mourn him.
To make myself less conspicuous I moved off to a little hillock near the city gate, from where I had a good view, and huddled beneath some trees there. But I could see they’d left a couple of guards at the entrance to the graveyard, who were warming their hands over a fire they’d made as if they were settling in for a long stay. I supposed they didn’t want anyone claiming the bodies, which belonged to the Romans. But still I couldn’t bring myself just to be on my way.
I’d noticed a small group that was lingering in the field beneath the hill. The family of one of the other men, I imagined, with maybe the same idea as I’d had about getting into the tomb. Sure enough, as soon as the other soldiers had gone and it was just the two watching over the dead, I saw the group move off towards the graveyard and go up to the guards. There was a conversation then, though I couldn’t hear it, while the soldiers, who looked Syrian, kept peering one way and the other over their shoulders to see if they were being watched. Then they hunched away from the fire towards the dark with one of the group, growing secretive and strange, and I knew what was happening—silver was changing hands. From the smoothness of the exchange I guessed that this was probably the usual way, for those who knew how things worked—you paid your fee, and got through.
Things had happened quickly after that. A couple of the men from the group rolled aside the stone in front of the tomb, and took a brand from one of the soldiers and went in. I thought they’d just come to prepare their man and be off, but an instant later they came out of the tomb with him slumped over their shoulders. I caught only that glimpse of them before the whole group crept off into the shadows, jumping the fence at the back of the graveyard and disappearing with their load into the dark. Meanwhile the soldiers just quietly rolled the gravestone back to its place, looked over their shoulders again, and returned to their fire.
All this left me a little breathless, because of the daring of it. I was happy about the thing on Jerubal’s account—it was the sort of conniving that would have pleased him. But there was no thought of my doing the same on his own behalf, with the lowly denarius I had in my purse. Instead I went into the city and bought some supper in the streets, finally getting my mutton, which I ate sitting on the steps of the bazaar that I’d climbed up that morning, and in the end I even managed to find a bed for myself in an inn near the Dung Gate, sharing a tiny room with half a dozen sweating men, though I slept like the dead. Then in the morning, I bought up a few provisions with what I had left of my money, and set out. And except to eat and to sleep I didn’t stop until I was back home again on the farm, and in my own bed.
Quite a bit of time has passed now since all that. Huram, when I came home, just looked me up and down as if I’d only been to market, and had kept him waiting for supper because I was late, and in fact the truth of it was, though it almost passed belief, that less than a fortnight had gone by since I’d left. But things were different between us afterwards, and he had more respect, and I saw how he’d pause an instant before telling me a thing so as to put it more as to a brother than to a slave. With Moriah it happened that not three months after I’d come back she ran off taking her son, and was never heard from, and Huram, to my surprise, didn’t lift a finger to go after her, nor did her name or even the boy’s ever so much as cross his lips. So it turned out that I was the one to give us an heir again, marrying a girl from Baal-Sarga who already had a child in her that I’d put there. When it came, and was a boy, I named it Huram, though I couldn’t have told you why except that it seemed the proper thing.
Jesus’s troupe I never had much to do with again. On the way home I’d passed through Capernaum and found out that most of them were just staying quiet after what had happened, confused by it all and afraid they’d be next. But Jesus’s brother Jacob had come back with them, interested in finding out what Jesus had had to say, and he and the Rock more or less took over things and kept the inner circle together. When a few months had gone by and the Romans hadn’t come after them, they started banding together some of his old followers on their side of the lake to keep up his teaching. In all of this, Jesus’s bastardy never seemed to have come out—maybe that was the difficult thing, as much as the crucifixion, that the Rock had had to come to understand. It wasn’t for me to say he did anything wrong not to let out the truth, when often enough it happened that a truth of that sort, that didn’t mean anything, stood in the way of one that did.
Nowadays rumours still come across the lake about that band, and how they get stranger by the day so that soon they’ll be worse than the Sons of Light. It was probably the shock of Jesus’s death that started twisting them, and that they had to strain to make sense of the thing, and that in time, with someone like Jesus, things got distorted. Now for every little thing he did when he was alive some story gets put in its place, and if he’d lanced somebody’s boil it turned out he’d saved a whole town, and if there were fifty in a place who’d followed him, now it was five hundred. Then there was the story that went around that the morning after Jesus was killed, Mary and Salome went to the grave and his body was gone. That might have had to do with the group who had come to the tomb for their relation, and somehow the story had got skewed, or maybe it had happened that the group had taken Jesus’s body by mistake. But eventually it got told that he’d risen from the dead and walked out of the place, and there were people enough to come along then to say they’d met him on the road afterwards looking as fit as you or me.
For all I know, it might have happened that way—wasn’t I there myself when Jesus brought Elazar back, who’d been dead as stone. The truth was it wouldn’t have surprised me to run into him one day on the road, and even less if who should be with him but old Jerubal, working some wile and grinning his grin. I used to imagine sometimes that he and Jesus had had the whole thing worked out between them from the start, the broken leg and then pretending to die and then those fellows who had come by afterwards to the tomb, their own confederates, it turned out, who’d come to spirit them away. And I’d see them setting off down the road and stopping for a bit in Capernaum to pull a little joke there on Jesus’s troupe about his rising from the dead before they headed off together to the ends of the earth.
It won’t be long, of course, before everyone has forgotten the man, or remembers only the trouble he had with his women or how he died a criminal or that he was a bastard, which sooner or later is sure to get out. But however things get remembered, you can be certain it won’t be how they actually were, since one man will change a bit of this to suit his fancy, and one a bit of that, and another will spice it to make a better story of it. And by and by the truth of the thing will get clouded, and he’ll be simply a yarn you tell to your children. And something will be lost then because he was a man of wisdom, the more so when even someone like me, who when I met him didn’t know more than when the crops came up and how many sheep it took to buy a bride, had come to understand something of him in the end.
It happened that I was in Gergesa once and heard someone in the market speak of a trip he’d made down the King’s Highway to the southern sea, through the land of the Nabateans with their great hidden city and on through the long stretch of the desert you had to cross full of bandits and wanderers with their camels and tents. Then finally you came to the sea, which was bordered by mountains so rocky and bare you’d think the gods themselves had deserted the place. You could go for days there, the man said, without meeting a soul, and all you saw was red rock to the one side of you and the grey of the sea to the other. But if you walked out from the shore, and put your face just underneath the water’s surface, it would astound you what you saw there, because a whole other world was going on under that greyness, as rich as the one
above it was lacking, with coloured fish of every sort and where even the rocks were of colours that beggared the mind and of shapes such as you wouldn’t imagine in nature or the world.
Normally I wouldn’t have given a story of the sort much credit, since you heard all kinds of things in the market, and hadn’t I been guilty of the occasional tale myself. But I remembered the vision that Jesus had told us about after he’d raised Elazar. And for a moment it was as if some curtain had been pushed aside in my head and I had a glimpse of something I understood but couldn’t have put into words, like some beautiful thing, so beautiful it took your breath away, that you saw for an instant through a gateway or door, then was gone.
I suppose Jesus was like that for me, something I saw as if in the twinkling of an eye. It was just the week or so that I was with him, in the end, and what was that but half a breath in the middle of all the years of my life. But still when I look out at the fields now or at the sheep grazing on the bit of pasture that overlooks the lake, a sort of haze seems to come off things that wasn’t there before, as if I’m expecting something good to come along at any minute, though I couldn’t tell you what it is. And though I’m happy enough to be at home, I’ll never see the likes of the times I had then, for better and worse, when it seemed that every good and ill that could come to a man, and every wonder and devilry, had passed in front of me. I often think of the night with Elazar, and seeing him rise up—for the longest time I thought that was the greatest wonder you could do, to bring a man back from the dead, since as pleasant as things might be on the other side, still I reckoned I’d rather be alive and kicking for as long as I could on this one. But now I think of the light Elazar saw in his dream, that was beckoning to him at the mouth of his cave from what place he didn’t know, and wonder what further realm there might be that we see nothing of, and that seems to call for me there in the glow that comes off the fields.